Aurorarama

by Jean-Christophe Valtat

  Such is the power of the mind once it is freed from the body, that Gabriel’s malevolent spirit, hovering over the place, seemed to have contaminated the whole wedding night. As he woke up from some short coma, with pixie dust of dried puke on his purple lapel (thus giving him an excuse to strip bare again) he could perceive Brentford’s stepfather trying to strangle the official photographer. One of the Cub-Clubbers, wearing long johns, his bare, wet feet on a lit spotlight, bragged that he was about to jump into the pool. Someone in underwear carried someone else on his back and dropped him on the piano with a thundering crash. The manager of the hotel complained to everyone he encountered that he had never seen such a shocking mess, and threatened to close the place, leaving everyone out in the cold.

  Gabriel himself, meanwhile, had found another occupation. Standing on the rather barbaric pavilion of the winter garden and still in the nude, he yelled unambiguous advances at Sybil’s mother, who had ventured into the semi-darkness to smell the arctic flowers. His argument was that she would lose nothing by her surrender, as she did not exist. She fled, apparently shocked by some aspect of his reasoning, even if Gabriel wasn’t sure which part.

  This last exploit eventually attracted Brentford to the pavilion. He looked hunched and weary, very much like a man stoically watching his world crumbling in slow motion. One of the guests had just confided to him that his son had dated Sybil in the past, and two minutes later, one of Brentford’s closest friends had avowed that he himself had had an affair with Seraphine after her breakup with Brentford. It all made him stagger like a man with stilettos in his back. That he was staggering toward the guillotine, he did not know yet.

  “Step back,” said Gabriel threateningly. “I’ve had enough trouble because of you.”

  Brentford, taken aback, stopped in his tracks.

  Scorpio pretty much rising, Gabriel went on, his voice nervously venomous.

  “I’ve been spied on, defamed, arrested, hypnotized, burglarized, cuckolded … Talk about a blast.”

  Brentford tried to speak as calmly as he could, so as to better bottle up this noble gas, which he felt was highly volatile.

  “I do not know what you’re talking about. Don’t you think you should sleep on all this? It would help me to get things back in order.”

  Gabriel sneered. He narrowed his eyes nastily, as if to take better aim.

  “Yes. His Highness the Duke Brentford Orsini. The man who puts things back in order, while his fiancée is being poked by some ugly quack in the Ingersarvik, while Baron Brainveil is watching.”

  Brentford said nothing, only turned his back and went away.

  Isaiah’s ludicrous threat about scoffers who discover that the bed is shorter than that a man can stretch himself on, and the covering narrower than that he can wrap himself in, had stopped amusing Brentford. For tonight, at the Splendide-Hôtel, he was that man and he was in that bed, barely breathing so as not to disturb Sybil, trying to endure in silence his bitter restlessness. He would have gladly exchanged for a nightmare the memories of that night. The failure of the feast humbled and humiliated him. Here he was, lecturing people on how to run a city when he could not even throw a decent party. The blend of boring arcticocrats and careless scenesters had made an especially disgusting cream cake, with the world’s worst best man as a poisoned cherry on top of it all. Talk about the True Community. As to what Gabriel had said … had Gabriel said anything? Brentford must have dreamed it. He did not want to think about it. A sentence circled in his head, lulling him until he fell asleep: There are only a few days left; if I want to go the Pole, I should go tomorrow, or it will be too late, too late, too late …

  Then he found himself there: he knew because “North Pole” was written on the record label that he stood upon, with some inscriptions that were either the song duration or some spatial bearings. The record spun, and he spun with it, very fast. Sleigh tracks around the pole moved as he turned and somehow formed the grooves of the record, and at every round he made, Brentford could see the needle approaching in the shape of an icebreaker stem, pointing toward him, closer each time it passed.

  And then he suddenly woke up. A shadow had shifted on the wall, as if someone were crawling or kneeling alongside the bed, not breathing but making some imperceptible buzzing and clicking. Brentford did not move, but followed the shadow out of the corners of his eyes, mentally detailing the muscles he could still count upon. All of a sudden the shadow made a wider move. Brentford rolled away as the awl struck the pillow, and then back over again, catching and blocking the arm before it could pull the point back. The arm cracked like a dry branch as Brentford twisted it. He felt teeth sinking into his thigh. He howled, and let himself fall from the bed, crushing the aggressor under his weight. The teeth released their pressure and Brentford pivoted quickly, seizing the struggling feet below him and trying to get up in spite of the pain. He grasped the ankles, and now held Little Tommy Twaddle at arm’s length, dodging the fist that aimed at his knees and the teeth snapping at his groin. He started turning on himself, more and more quickly, knocking the dummy’s head into everything that met its trajectory, bedpost, mantel, commode. He couldn’t see very well, but he could hear the head splinter and crack and burst, shards of wood and scraps of metal flying everywhere, and the croaking screams of the automaton. Brentford soon felt dizzy and had to stop before falling down, but kept on bashing the dummy down against the floor, sending cogs rolling everywhere, until the croaking stopped and the legs he held did not twitch anymore and were just two useless logs he threw across the room. Almost tripping over an eye that looked at him in a moon ray, he kicked it under the bed in anger and disgust. It rebounded against the wall, rolled a little, like a marble, or a ball in a slowing roulette wheel, and then everything went still. He turned toward Sybil, surprised that she did not wake up. As he approached the nebulous whiteness atop the bed, he saw that it was her wedding dress.

  And the wedding dress was empty.

  The crew jumped out to stabilize the ship, mooring it to the crystal pillars.

  Book Three

  No Earthly Pole

  But suddenly a perfect veil of rays showers from the zenith out over the northern skies; they are so fine and bright, like the finest of glittering silver threads. Is it the fire-giant Surt himself, striking his mighty silver harp, so that the strings tremble and sparkle in the glow of the flames of Muspelheim? Yes, it is harp music, wildly storming in the darkness; it is the riotous war-dance of Surt’s sons. And again at times it is like softly playing, gently rocking, silvery waves, on which dreams travel into unknown worlds.

  Farthest North: Being a Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship Fram 1893-96, and of a Fifteen Months’ Sleigh Journey by Dr. Nansen and Lieut. Johannsen

  CHAPTER XXI

  Qivigtoq

  So swift, so pure, so cold, so bright,

  They pierced my frame with icy wound;

  And all that half-year’s polar night,

  Those dancing streamers wrapp’d me round.

  George Crabbe, Sir Eustace Grey, 1807

  That was it. Gabriel had gone pillortoq, now he was going qivigtoq.

  He had seen it all and done it all. He had lost his love and forsaken his friend. Stella, he would love forever (especially now that forever was simply the next couple of hours), but his love for her had drained him of his will to live. By going crazy at Brentford’s wedding, he had severed the last tie that had linked him to a city where in the past week he had seen nothing anyway but hypocrisy, violence, and injustice. His friend’s efforts to ameliorate it now made him snigger at his well-meaning naivety. Gabriel would never come across a better allegory of society, he thought, than the one he had been privy to at the Ingersarvik: orgy under hypnosis for the benefit of old vicious vampires.

  His mind was lucid as ice crystal, and about as brittle. But he had taken his decision, or, as with every true decision, it had taken him. Dying in the cold was the coolest thing to do. In the time-honoured I
nuk tradition of the qivigtoq, he would lose himself in the polar wilderness, and if he ever came back as one moody, melancholy ghost, he would not be very different from what he had been, anyway.

  Easier said than done, though. The Air Architecture, even in its present state, precluded almost all amateur attempts at hypothermia within the city limits. Technically, the city temperatures were such that the trick could be tried if you were determined and had time on your hands. But the numerous examples of people who had been found frostbitten by the Health Angels and brought back to life to be amputated without their consent were enough to make one consider alternative schemes.

  Still, getting beyond the city limits was a boring business. Gabriel trudged directly from the hotel, on rather slippery slopes, to the top of Icy Heights and then eastward toward the Black Cliffs, where he knew he could slip beyond the pale. He had to walk atop the precipitous crag, along a narrow path where greasy black rocks emerged from under the snow.

  On his right, beyond a wire fence, an immense field of indistinct, spectral wind vanes roared loudly in the darkness, while narrow light beams coming from the mills at their base caught in their pale white glare the slow flakes of a lazy snow. Gabriel had the feeling, which occurred frequently, that he was living out a scene lifted from a book, but usually that was a sensation that soothed him more than it disquieted him.

  On his left the city spread and sprawled beneath him, its silver and golden lights strewn in Marco Polo Bay like ducats and doubloons from a burst treasure chest. It moved him, even if he had no tears anymore. Clusters of distant lights was the view of Mankind that he liked the best. The lights had the archaic charm of little fires on a plain, and the frailty about them, if it did not excuse anything, at least explained a lot of Man’s stubborn ruthlessness. Mankind had not started the mess that was life, after all. And on the whole, it had been an interesting species to be a part of, the girls especially, as long as you remembered to watch your back.

  New Venice, of course, he had loved. It was the quintessence of what Mankind was about, when he summed it up: the single-mindedness of surviving at any cost, even if it meant eating up the rotting corpses of your friends, and a certain sense of the grandiloquent gesture and gratuitous ornament. But he knew the New Venetian scene by heart, and lately he had seen too much of the wings. There were no regrets to have. The heydays, he was sure, were over. He had lived like a New Venetian, quite to the full, and he would die like one: frozen to the bone, his shape deep in the snow, like another footprint toward no earthly pole. Soon the city disappeared from his sight, preventing the seductive winks of light that could have brought him back, and now, on his left, he could divine, more than he could see, the frozen ocean, a greyish rough expanse of chaotic nothing, like an immense crumpled sheet of paper imperfectly flattened out.

  The way the Air Architecture worked was beyond his comprehension. But he could clearly make out the barrier of turbulent yellow-tinted flames—the Fire Maidens, as they were called—that surrounded the city at wide intervals, and the kind of hazy airwall that they built. It made him think of the sword of flames Mougrabin had talked about. Leaving Eden of one’s own accord, as he was doing now, certainly showed, he thought, some strength of character.

  Maybe that was what had happened to Mankind. That original sin story was an embarrassed cover-up. Man had simply walked out, bored or angry at being ordered around. Or he’d lost any interest in God as soon as he had the girl to fool around with. He had abducted her, starting a long tradition of romantic elopement. God had first thought good riddance, but had soon missed his favourite pet. Animals were less fun to play with. Eventually God grew tired of promenading alone in the evening breeze, and for the first time, like an ill-loved, ill-loving father, He learned the pangs of regret and bitterness. He closed the Garden and let it rot like an old fairground park. An angel still kept the rusty gates, just to make it desirable again. By and by, time passed and the Ice had covered everything. When men came back to the pole, even those who remembered Eden and thought it could well have been there did not recognize it. But they still had the Adamic streak and had taken pleasure in renaming everything, beast and plant and crag. What a brilliant theology, chuckled Gabriel, reassured to see that the effects of alcohol had not quite worn off and would carry him, lightheaded, a little further on.

  The Air Architecture area was forbidden because the concentrated methane fumes it emanated were notoriously poisonous, but Brentford had once told him of a small opening in a fence near a power plant where someone (let us say a Navy Cadet from the Belknap Base looking for a short cut while on a more or less authorized leave) could go through with minimal fuss. Gabriel found it easy enough, indeed, to crawl through the fence that surrounded the brick building (no light coming now through the strange curlicues of its cast-iron windows) and run, holding his breath, to the other side of the site, to the gate beyond the derrick, and then onward to his death.

  As soon as he had left the plant behind and drawn close to the edge of the cliff, Gabriel felt the difference. New Venice was nothing close to hot or even warm, but outside was certainly airsome, and the atmosphere was as solid as a hall of mirrors. Cold is an element unto itself, with a whole physics of its own, and even a metaphysics, if he remembered what Boehme had written—that the Deity, at its innermost kernel, is dark and cold, “like winter, when there is a fierce, bitter, cold frost, when water is frozen into ice,” and that is what holds the Creation together. Deity or not, the universe was certainly at heart a cold and dark affair, and here was the best place to never forget it.

  Still, Gabriel advanced, bent forward with his fists clenched in his pockets, the cold plastering him in great swathes, as if to mould his death mask. He would have been curious to see a wine-spirit thermometer (mercury would have frozen, no doubt), but some part of him deemed it better not to know the truth. With every breath, vapour crystallized and fell to bits on the ground. It made him feel like that fairy-tale girl whose every word is turned to diamonds, whereas at the wedding he had rather felt like her wicked sister who ends up spewing toads.

  By a stroke of luck, though the air was wet, it wasn’t too windy, which Gabriel found a favourable omen. If he wanted to die from the cold, he did not want to suffer from it too much before going numb. Walking headlong through thick curtains made of millions of hanging, tingling razorblades is one thing, but you don’t want buckets of cold water thrown in your face while doing it.

  For someone who was on his way to hypothermia, he was not so badly equipped, after all. His warm-whiskered face was bare, because a comforter or balaclava would have caused his breath to freeze right on his moist skin, and that was even more displeasing than having some ice-fiend tricksters slap you and pull your nose in the dark. A fur-lined greatcoat with pockets full of warming qiviut—musk ox wool—, thick-soled boots insulated with bladder-sedge and several pairs of hareskin socks, Knudsen of Copenhagen snow-goggles, an Elsinore hat with comfortable earflaps, wolfskin gloves and woollen overmittens—these were a few of his favourite things. He chuckled at the paradox, and thought, I could always shed some of them on my way, giving dramatic clues to a potential search party. Being found dead in the purple frock coat was a flourish to be considered. Such were his musings as he arrived at Black Cliffs Bay.

  On his left, the Lincoln Sea shone moodily, waiting for some better demiurge to put some order into its chaotic rubble, which looked like ruins, or a like a building site. On his right he could make out the mile-high peaks of the New America range, like a starless area of the night. Gabriel tried to advance calmly. He knew he could take a good thermal shock, as long as he was not drenched in sweat. It wasn’t pneumonia that was on his agenda. He also knew, as he had been told countless times, that most people who had died in similar conditions had succumbed to exhaustion rather than from the cold itself. They were persuaded they had to move until they could not move anymore, when a bit of rest could have saved them. So it was important to never ever stop if he wanted to di
e properly. So he plodded, and tumbled, and trudged onward.

  It was rough going, but the tattoo pushed him on, holding him by the neck as if he were some unclean, reluctant kitten. Somewhere above him shone the star that promised death by fever or cold. As soon as Stella had told him about it, the disastrophile in him had known how it would all end. Sometimes, he stopped for a little while and looked up at the night sky, trying to localize the aster that was his (no: he belonged to it). But he would not have known the Centaur even if it had kicked him in the face with its hooves, just as the cold was doing right now. Stars were nameless to him and constellations remained dead letters. He would have liked Stella to be with him, both of them sitting right on that cliff, passing a bottle to and fro, and laughing as they baptized them all again: the Tambourine, the Lobster, the Bearded Woman, the Carrion, the Skunk, the Poleaxe, the Legless Cripple, the Skull, the Fool. He remembered how the zodiac on Stella’s back had made stars out of her birthmarks, and this wrung out a tear from him that stung as it froze on his cheek. He slipped on the treacherous shale and fell, inches away from the cliff edge. “The Fool, huh?” he winced with a painful face that he felt was being flayed alive. It was a good thing again that he was so muffled up in clothes that they cushioned the fall and he did not break any bones. That would not have made things easier, oh no. He got up, a small bruise on his buttocks, relieved that nobody had seen him and that he could still hobble on toward his farthest nowhere.